In Our Image

By

George Sim Johnston

Updated May 26, 1998 12:01 a.m. ET

For 2,000 years a favorite occupation of intellectuals has been to strip away the "mythology" of the Gospels in order to reveal the hard "truth" behind them. The result has been the construction of a largely fictional character known as the "historical Jesus."

The enterprise was launched by a second-century scholar named Celsus, who thought Christianity a threat to the social order. Today, it is carried on by the Jesus Seminar, a group of thinkers devoted to de-divinizing Christ. Along the...